Deep Dive: The Dreaded Marketing, Chapter 1
And now for the part that all of us dread: marketing.
There are a lot of different pieces to this particular puzzle, and a little forethought can go a long way. There are big cogs and little cogs, and all of them work together towards your goal. There are probably easily hundreds of books on the (indie-published) market to tell you how to market your indie-published book, and while any of them might be worth a couple of somethings here and there, none of them are going to do a damn thing for you unless you act for yourself. All of those books have essentially the same advice (with minor variation for flair or genre), and I’m going to break it down here:
Book In The Shape of… a Genre! SEO, Scene 1
The first most important thing to consider is how are people going to find your book. What genre(s) does it favor? How is it going to get listed in a digital store? What section will people need to be in to see it on a shelf? When we are asked which genre we prefer to work in, most of us can easily answer “speculative fiction” or “urban fantasy” or “alternate historical paranormal science romance”. When we have to pick the genre for a specific story, though, it’s easy to get a little gummed up: we have been in the weeds watching this scene unfold, and it’s got gothic faery erotic undertones with a hard boiled noir overcoat dressed in Indigenous adventure folklore. Where does it fit on the genre shelf?
Particularly when categorizing your work for online marketplaces, start with the broadest categories and then narrow down your description to two or three final niches. Don’t try to shoe-horn your title into the Romance section (a high-traffic category) if there only happens to be an incidental love angle in between the horror, suspense, and dragon-hunting. People looking for a romance story are going to reject your book, and that’s when you end up with bad reviews because someone did not get the thing they expected.
Okay, I’m going to get into this more a bit later, but I’ll drop this little nugget of wisdom right now: People do not (generally) write bad reviews about bad books, they tend to write bad reviews about books that disappointed their expectations – and getting reviews is a key feature of marketing. Thus, make sure to choose a genre that fits as close to reader expectations as you can. I mean, yes, people write bad reviews for bad books, too, but that’s a different loci of control; this one is about managing reader expectation.
When you’re writing your description and filling in the keywords for your listing, pick between seven and ten key phrases that will help people find your story. This is where you’d name your super-niche genre description and add any other dimensions that will bring in the right eyeballs. Do you have a unique word in the title that people might look for? Use that. Is there a unique character name throughout your series? Use that. Does your character give an intense monologue that you think is going to be mandatory middle school memorization in ten years? Don’t use that, it’s too long. Stick to the “what would people plug into a search engine to find books like mine” as your guiding principle.
Because this is the first phase of your search engine optimization, the fabled SEO. There are many levels to this, but getting your genre right and listing your book with the right keywords are fundamental. The next is…
The Duke of URL: SEO, Scene 2
I’m not rabbit-holing here, I promise, but this is when we need to talk about your pen name. I personally believe that you can have as many pen names as you want to manage because they are essentially different brands. You could write under one name for literary fiction, another for science fiction, and still another for erotica, and the reason that you would use different pen names for each of those is that they do not share an audience. The name that goes on the front of the book is the one that a reader will associate with a writer, meaning the genre, style, tone, and/or vibe. Do you have to have a different pen name for different genres? No, of course not, but understand that unless you are a one-genre author (and I do count adjacent genres as “one”, like science versus speculative fiction), your readers will have to sort out if your newest masterpiece is a continuation of the World War II paranormal romance you put out last year or another installment from the Mythos-inspired fairy tales series.
But, I must highly recommend this: do not use your real, legal name if you can help it. For many of us, initials are okay if our names are unique enough, but the first and most obvious reason, especially (but not exclusively) if you’re a woman, is that legal names can change from marriage, divorce, or whatevers. The second reason is that you never know what kind of weirdos are reading your books, and you definitely want to have a buffer of anonymity between you and the audience. This is a safety issue on multiple levels, but mostly it’s about your brand.
And this brings us to the central core of your brand: you need a website.
The website should be a place where your readers can find links to every single thing you’ve ever published, but what if you’ve published under multiple pen names? There are a few different ways to manage this, but I’d recommend picking a URL that reflects your Main (to use the nerd colloquial) and operating from there – which is to say, if you have multiple “brands”, you don’t need to maintain a website for each one. Use pages under your main brand to list the titles published under your Alt. If you think that folks are going to search first for your Alts, you can purchase domains that reflect those and have them redirect to your Main so that you only have to maintain (and pay for the hosting on) one website. You’ll still have to pay the yearly domain registration fee for the redirected ones, so factor that in.
What goes on your website besides just listing your books? Well, you should probably maintain some kind of blog, talking about your process and projects you’ve got in the works, and you should probably also discuss where you might be popping up in person. And, yes, you need to use your website to collect email addresses for The Newsletter. (More on that next week.)
The most important factor in picking out your primary domain is going to be your SEO. You have to think about how people are going to search for your book or for you, and how easy or hard it will be to confuse you with someone else. Don White is a singer/author/humorist, but also a US senator, a Black architect, and a naval admiral – no, those are not all the same individual. It’s a simple name that has terrible SEO because it’s way too easy to get it confused with someone else. On the other end of the scale, GregoryRonaldoFrancisIII.com might seem like a very difficult-to-confuse domain, but no one is going to remember it, and is it a III or a 3, and was it Ronald or Ronaldo? A decent workaround is if you have a simple name, add “writer” or “author” to the domain, and maybe consider that even if you don’t have a simple name.
ICANN, the organization that decides what kinds of domains we get to use, says that .com is for commercial purposes, .net is for networks, .edu is for educational institutions, and .org is for non-profit organizations. There are lots of other dangly bits (officially the “top level domain”) you can get such as .info or .blog, but you have to be very specific when you share that URL because everyone in the world has been conditioned to the default .com.
Media That Is Social
A weird thing happens when authors get on social media. Where they were once posting and re-posting memes and replying to threads like a boss, having great conversations, as soon as they need to talk about a book or story they’re publishing, they freeze up. Suddenly, they worry about if they’re talking about their book too much or if they’re coming across as too “market-y” or “advertise-y”. They second-guess everything they say about the book and fear becoming part of the noise and alienating their audience.
The easy way to avoid this is to treat your social media channels as conversations and talk about things other than where to buy your book – but still related to writing. Did you get to have an awesome chit-chat with an anthropology professor for your research? Honestly, that should also be a blog post, but definitely get it on your social media – which, if you have the right plugins on your website, should be automatically updated when you blog. Technology is amazing.
Here’s the most important part of successful social media metrics: it doesn’t matter how many people are following your profile; it only matters how many people are engaging with your content. It is better to have 100 dedicated followers who like and share your posts, who reply and give effective feedback, than it is to have 100,000 followers who only give thumbs-up and hearts (if they do anything at all). The dirty secret of the internet is that if you have 100K+ followers and you’re not already a celebrity (and usually even if you are), the vast majority of those followers are bots. The traffic isn’t real, and your message isn’t getting anywhere.
Now, which social media platforms are the best? There’s no one answer to that, but stick to the ones where you have the best engagement as a normal human before you put on your author disguise. I’m not going to name names, but in general, Butterflies are better than Birds. Certain fan bases gravitate towards certain platforms – romance readers are on Facebook a lot, sci-fi nerds congregate on Reddit, and YA can be found in droves on TikTok and the Tubes. If you haven’t already reached 1000 followers on any of your writer-branded profiles, seek out your audience where they already are and engage with them there. Neil Gaiman is actually really big on Tumblr, and Andy Weir used his blog to crowdsource the research when he wrote the Martian.
Don’t try to establish a foothold on all the platforms! That can be nerve-racking and creates way more work than necessary. Pick one or two, post to them regularly, and engage with your audience. Yes, you could use something like Hubspot or Buffer to post to all the channels simultaneously, but everywhere that you post requires your attention to nurture those relationships, and in too many places, you’re sinking valuable time that you could be using writing.
One last word on this (because this can be its own whole-ass course): for the same reason you want to use a pen name, establish your identity specifically as an author on social media separate from your personal life. You never know when things are going to get hot and you enjoy tons of success, and then some rando creep comments on a picture of your cat from 2017 and asks if you live in the same house. That is a chilling and terrifying moment.
The Mandate of the Reader
This is the most important dimension of any kind of success we can entertain: if the readers don’t like it, it’s not going to be successful.
Okay, let me take a pause here and describe a phenomenon to differentiate between “success” and “sales”, because you’ll notice that I use the former word much more frequently than the latter. I’m using success to describe a scenario where your books are selling well, where your stories are recognized, and where people you don’t know personally are talking about your work. This is separate from just sales which can be manipulated by a variety of sources and do not necessarily represent the mandate of the readers.
You’ve probably heard of the BookTok phenomenon where influencers on TikTok pick titles, do micro-reviews or generic overviews, and then the crowd goes wild. The problem is that the majority of those influencers haven’t bothered to read (or critically read) the book, and a lot of those books are hot trash. The influencers are being paid to appeal to their audience, and the same dopamine manipulation that all social media uses triggers sales – but it does not necessarily lead to an honest fan base.
The mandate of the reader is achieved when a book, story, or author is discussed critically in generally positive ways. The use of critical is, well, critical and is differentiated from criticism. To engage with anything critically is to strive to understand it, to think logically and rationally about it, to analyze it with an open mind about what it represents. Critical theories about any topic are just comprehensive analyses of that topic, not necessarily criticisms – which is where a lot of… um… reactionary responses come from when talking about any critical theory at all.
Once a certain number of people have read a story or an author has published a certain (high) number of successful stories, a ratio of approval versus disapproval will emerge. Stephen King is a great example of this: he is wildly successful and is one of the best-selling authors of all time (as well as one of the most prolific), but the mandate of the readers is made up of two distinct groups between those who love his work and those who hate his work. The key is that the people who hate his work can intelligently discuss what they don’t like about it, as can people who do like it.
How do we as indie authors cash in on this mandate?
Reviews.
In our age of information and algorithms and online reputation, the single most powerful marketing dimension is in honest, critical reviews – and a lot of them. A 5-star book with two reviews is probably not going to get very far, but a 4.3-star book with over a hundred reviews is going to get a lot more attention. Part of it is that weird psychological phenomenon of group behavior: few people want to be the only one doing something like hitting the dance floor – calling attention to yourself on a stage – but then a second person feels a little empowered and gets out there to boogie. Once a third person gets out there, then it’s like social permission for everyone to engage in the same behavior, and that applies to dance clubs and book reviews alike.
So, you need to get that awesome community that you’ve been building to leave reviews where people can see them. If you’re listed on Amazon, clearly that’s the Number One place to review, followed closely by Goodreads (owned by Amazon), but for the off-the-beaten-path, there’s the Storygraph. Telling you how awesome you are in private messages or texts or emails is great for an ego boost, but it doesn’t do anything to boost your success. (Although, in James Fell fashion, you could use them as advertisements and back-blurbs…)
Okay, that’s enough for one day. I’ve thrown a lot at you, and there’s actually a lot more to go, but we’ll save that for next week.